Dead I Well May Be

by Adrian McKinty

  I close my eyes.

  It well may be.

  Other Serpent’s Tail titles of interest

  David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet

  Nineteen Seventy Four

  ‘Breathless, extravagant, ultra-violent…Vinnie Jones should buy the film rights fast’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘Peace has found his own voice – full of dazzling, intense poetry and visceral violence’ Uncut

  ‘Peace’s storytelling may be unrelentingly dark, at times even nightmarish, but what impresses most about the books…is the author’s literary ambition. Peace uses prose like a blunt weapon. His sentences are hypnotic, repetitive, incantatory. Pages seem to fly by. Sharpened dialogue jostles with drifting thoughts. Snatches of pop lyrics wrestle with the fractured ravings of the killer. Victims swirl through the text, alive, dead, alive again…Peace is at the forefront of a generation of hard-boiled crime writers pushing the genre into new and difficult territory’ Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘David Peace’s stunning debut has done for the county what Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy did for Los Angeles…This is a brilliant first novel, written with tremendous pace and passion’ Yorkshire Post

  Nineteen Seventy Seven

  ‘Quite simply, this is the future of British crime fiction…the finest work of literature I’ve read this year – and its ending is as extraordinary and original as what precedes it’ Time Out

  ‘With a human landscape that is violent and unrelentingly bleak, Peace’s fiction is two or three shades the other side of noir’ New Statesman

  ‘One hell of a read’ Crime Time

  ‘Peace’s Boschian landscape of West Yorkshire’s all-out dystopia began with Nineteen Seventy Four and a young girl’s murdered body, found in a ditch with swan’s wings sewn to its shoulder blades. While atmospheric with ’70s music and ads, that first installment set the quartet’s bleak Orwellian tone, though with echoes of the complex modes of Dos Passos’ USA and the demonic grimness, violence, corruption and conspiracies of James Ellroy’ Kirkus Reviews

  Nineteen Eighty

  ‘A bleak portrait of those times, written in a stylised prose that takes a few pages to attune to but which admirably suits the subject matter. It’s black and moving’ Observer

  ‘His best yet, a top-drawer thriller which grabs the reader by the scruff of the neck and doesn’t let go until the last page…unmatched…his writing these days stands in comparison with American masters like Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy and Walter Mosley…Another winner from David Peace, whose name on the cover is these days a guarantee of existence, a must-read thriller of originality and style that confirms him to be one of the best crime writers anywhere’ Yorkshire Post

  ‘He has found his own, equally experimental, approach and it further enhances the oppressively sombre tone…an impressive addition to the noir genre’ Metro

  ‘Read a book by David Peace. If you want to know what Leeds was like in the 70s and early 80s then David Peace is the authority’ Leeds Guide

  Nineteen Eighty Three

  ‘Will undoubtedly stand as a major achievement in British dark fiction… the pace is relentless, the violence gut-wrenching, the style staccato-plus and the morality bleak and forlorn, but Peace’s voice is powerful and unique. This is compelling stuff that will leave no one indifferent’ Guardian

  ‘This is fiction that comes with a sense of moral gravity, clearly opposed to diluting the horrific effects of crime for the sake of bland entertainment. There is no light relief and, for most of the characters, no hope. Peace’s series offers a fierce indictment of the era’ Independent

  ‘British crime fiction’s most exciting new voice in decades’ GQ

  ‘Peace is a manic James Joyce of the crime novel…jump cutting like a celluloid magus through space and time, reciting incantations and prayers, invoking the horror of grim lives, grim crimes, grim times’ Sleazenation

  ‘Beautifully crafted, almost poetic prose isn’t what you would expect from a crime novel, but David Peace isn’t an ordinary crime writer’ Big Issue

  ‘The novel’s power lies in its poetic depictions of violence and in its flawless period detail, which grounds it convincingly in the Eighties. Fiction and history merge, and the personal and the political mirror each other, creating a disturbing portrait of social decay. Rarely has the crime novel managed to say something more serious and enduring than in Peace’s masterful quartet’ New Statesman

  ‘If you like your fiction to be vicious and chaotic, the Red Riding Quartet reveals Peace to be one of the masters of the form’ Sunday Herald

  ‘This is the final instalment, and it is magnificent. The three years since his debut have seen Ossett-born Peace grow into one of the most distinctive and compelling crime novelists in the world…Nineteen Eighty Three is Peace’s best yet’ Yorkshire Post

  ‘A raw and furious wade through the Valley of Death that understates its big sweet hell of pages chock-a-block with violated corpses and red rain running with blood’ Kirkus Reviews

  ‘Nineteen Eighty Three is a profound piece of British crime fiction that howls with the horror of its subject matter’ Leeds Guide

  ‘The final instalment of David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet arrives with a sickening thud, the flutter of leathery wings and an ominous darkening of the skies…terrible. And magnificent’ Big Issue in the North

  ‘A gripping read, written in short breathless sentences – at times a sort of hardcore poetry…Not for the faint-hearted, this is as hard as a Leeds pavement on a Saturday night’ Birmingham Post

  ‘Nineteen Eighty Three is every bit as powerful as the books that have preceded it’ Flux

  ‘David Peace is the obvious successor to Derek Raymond’s title of King of British noir…Dark, depressing but important fiction from a very fine writer’ Time Out

  ‘Stunning…Each novel powerfully evokes the period surrounding the crimes and capture of the Yorkshire Ripper’ Crime Time